An MIT student asked AI to make her headshot more ‘professional.’ It gave her lighter skin and blue eyes.
“I was like, ‘Wow, does this thing think I should become white to become more professional?’” said Wang, who is Asian American.
@meredithw@Wolven I think social sciences could actually use ”jailbroken” LLM’s (without the guardrails making them civic) to construct quantitative proof models pointing out the many forms #structural#racism in a clear & reproducable manner.
I find there’s not enough #computational branches in the #humanities. Economy is one, but they like to think they’re not a behavioral science. Tsk.
@meredithw@Wolven if cryptofascist libertarians, Musk-and-or-your-billionaire-loving wankers, embarrassed millionaires, billionaires-in-waiting, love-the-police-state-for-thee-not-for-me fuckwads are developing the software then that's what you get
@blogdiva@meredithw@Wolven It's not a software issue, it's a training data issue. There's a difference. Nobody actively "programs" an AI to be racist, but people rarely, if ever, remember to actively escape the demographic distribution they see every day when they look for training data. And in some cases, it's actually impossible, because genetic outliers like albinos, for example, just ARE too rare to be well-represented in training image sets.
we understand that. what silver-spooned techbros don't is that it's not enough to be not-racist. you have to be ANTI-RACIST. but that's antithetical to who they are. they do insist they are superior. even their not-so-unmelanined canon fodder coming from southern hemisphere cultures metastasized by castes & caciquismos, they believe their adjacency to the unmelanined makes them our betters. and that oozes into the code
@freemo@meredithw@Wolven and when HR asks for resumes of qualified professional applicants you think the same thing won’t happen? At best, you’ll get people whose resumes superficially look just like those of current employees, most likely it will reject every non-Anglo-Saxon name.
Huh? What do you mean by "same thing might happen"... how would HR turn a persons picture into a new picture? I think your talking about racial discrimination, sure, and there is plenty of that, but how is that the same as what the AI did?
@freemo@meredithw@Wolven either you can see why systems that score [stereotypically white things] as objectively more professional than [stereotypically Asian things] will make discrimination worse, or you don’t. I don’t think anything I can say will help you understand.
Actually, what you just said now explained it, thank you... Again could have done without the disgraceful attitude, but thanks anyway, I understand what you meant now.
There is a big difference between asking if someone is within the range of professionalism vs asking to make an image more professional. When asking to make an image more professional it will naturally make the image as close to the "average" image as possible, this means making it white.
This isnt the same as the AI thinking white is a requirement for professionalism, as there may very well be outliers that are non-white and still considered professional.
What it boils down to is when changing the image it had no idea that clothing and hairstyles (things we can change) should be prefered over eye color or skin color.. So it didnt bother to prioritize
That said if they were to create an AI specifically designed to check professionalism one would hope it would design in the proper considerations that realize these aspects, it wouldnt be hard to do.
@freemo@theothersimo@meredithw@Wolven
You might hope that, but there are already AIs that assess for professionalism, and they don't design in these proper considerations.
Then that is quite concerning.. Can you point me to some links on AI specifically designed for detecting professionalism and any reference to how they dont account for this?
@meredithw@Wolven AI are/is being trained really badly. They need to stop being lazy and create training libraries of photos and articles to reflect that there is a wide range of people that are “professional”, “successful”, “creative”, “happy”, and every other darned thing.
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